Hip-hop women shredding the veil: Race and class in popular feminist identity

South Atlantic Quarterly

Volumn 104, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 425-444

  Morgan, Marcyliena ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 35648970760     PISSN: 00382876     EISSN: 15278026     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00382876-104-3-425     Document Type: Review

References (50)

1. See Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: William Morrow, 1984);
2. Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987);
3. Barbara Smith, ed., Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (New York: Kitchen Table/Women of Color, 1983);
4. Smith, "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism," in The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 168-85;
5. and Leith Mullings, "Images, Ideology, and Women of Color," in Women of Color in U. S. Society, ed. Maxine Baca Zinn and Bonnie Thornton Dill (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 265-89.
6. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1990).
7. W. E. B. Du Bois, Dark Water: Voices from within the Veil (1920; Millwood, NY: Krauss International, 1975), 172. I would like to thank Leith Mullings for first introducing me to this quote.
8. See Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1981);
9. Giddings, When and Where I Enter;
10. and Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 1990).
11. See Bonnie Thornton Dill, "Fictive Kin, Paper Sons, and Compradrazgo: Women of Color and the Struggle for Family Survival," in Women of Color in U.S. Society, ed. Maxine Baca Zinn and Bonnie Thornton Dill (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 149-69.
12. See Mullings, "Images, Ideology, and Women of Color," 265.
13. The phrase hip-hop women refers to those who assert that they grew up in hip-hop culture and are a product of it. Though misogyny in hip-hop continues to be a major issue, the focus of this article is women's voices and their agency within the male-dominated genre of hip-hop.This article is also an attempt to participate in what Marta Savigliano, in Tango and the Political Economy of Passion (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1995), calls the "world economy of passion." She uses passion to analyze the contestations around race, class, sexuality, nation, and the tango.
14. C. Delores Tucker was chair of the National Political Congress of Black Women and Chair of the Democratic National Committee Black Caucus. In the 1990s, she participated in a national campaign against violent lyrics in rap music. In 1997, she and her husband sued the estate of Tupac Shakur for $10 million over lyrics in which Shakur rhymed her name with an obscenity. Her lawsuit alleged, among other things, that her husband, William Tucker, had suffered loss of "consortium."
15. See, for instance, bell hooks, Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (New York: Routledge, 1994).
16. Angela Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday (New York: Pantheon, 1998);
17. Michael C. Dawson, Black Visions: The Roots of Contemporary African-American Political Ideologies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001);
18. Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994);
19. Dionne Bennett, "The Love Difference Makes: Intersubjectivity and the Emotional Politics of African American Romantic Ritual" (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2003).
20. Medusa, "My Pussy's Gangsta."
21. See Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, "African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race," Signs 17 (1992): 251-74.
22. Cheryl L. Harris, "Finding Sojourner's Truth: Race, Gender, and the Institution of Property," Cardozo Law Review 18 (1996): 306-409.
23. Marcyliena Morgan, Language, Discourse, and Power in African American Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
24. Robin Lakoff, Language and Woman's Place (New York: Harper & Row, 1975).
25. These, of course, are references to African American verbal genres. See Morgan, Language, Discourse, and Power in African American Culture;
26. Claudia Mitchell-Kernan, Language Behavior in a Black Urban Community (Berkeley, CA: Language Behavior Research Laboratory, 1971);
27. Geneva Smitherman, Talkin That Talk: Language, Culture and Education in African America (London: Routledge, 2000).
28. Sarah Jones, "Your Revolution," 1999.
29. See Gwendolyn Pough, Check It While I Wreck It: Black Womanhood, Hip-Hop Culture, and the Public Sphere (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004);
30. Cheryl L. Keyes, Rap Music and Street Consciousness (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002);
31. Joan Morgan, When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: My Life as a Hip-Hop Feminist (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999).
32. See Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977);
33. and Roger Abrahams and John Szwed, After Africa: Extracts from the British Travel Accounts and Journals of the Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Centuries Concerning the Slaves, Their Manners and Customs in the British West Indies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983).
34. See, for example, Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness.
35. Daphne Duval Harrison, Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920s (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 8.
36. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, xv.
37. See Rose, Black Noise.
38. For studies of teenage girls' identity, see Michelle Fine and Pat Macpherson, "Over Dinner: Feminism and Adolescent Female Bodies," in Gender and Education, ed. Sari Knopp Bilden and Diane Pollard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 126-54:
39. Bonnie J. Ross Leadbeater and Niobe Way, eds., Urban Girls: Resisting Stereotypes, Creating Identities (New York: New York University Press, 1996);
40. Deborah Tolman, Dilemmas of Desire: Teenage Girls Talk about Sexuality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
41. Audre Lorde, "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power," in Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory, ed. Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 277-82.
42. Queen Latifah, "The Evil That Men Do," 1989.
43. Michael Small, Break It Down. The Inside Story from the New Leaders of Rap (New York: Citadel, 1992), 51-53.
44. Missy Elliott, "She's a Bitch" (Background Records, 1999).
45. Rah Digga, "Dirty Harriet" (Elektra Records, 1999).
46. Savigliano, Tango and the Political Economy of Passion.
47. See also Dorinne Kondo, About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theater (London: Routledge, 1997).
48. See Zora Neale Hurston, I Love Myself When I Am Laughing . . . and Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader, ed. Alice Walker (New York: Feminist Press, 1979).
49. Bennett, "The Love Difference Makes," 14.
50. Pough, Check It While I Wreck It, 86.